Do not go where the path may lead: go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

OUCH.

I just had a birthday and in a curious way, it was a keeper.

At my age (57, ouch again) I don’t usually look forward to adding another integer to my sum (see Mom, I learned something in Mr. Warneke’s math class!). But combine a birthday with your retirement and it feels pretty special.

And because you’re reading it here now, my birthday, my retirement, have become the news.

I made a decision to publish my personal information and anyone on this blue and green globe with computer access, can be a customer of my little ego-story.

The world we live in today allows us to jump out of our consumer role and not just read or listen to the news.

We can make the news.

Let me explain more fully.

Growing up I was a paperboy. You too? Cool …

Yup, every day except Sunday, I picked up a bundle of Hamilton Spectators from the street corner just down from my childhood friend Dougie Dawson’s house.

(ADHD Aside: I love people who give all of their kids names with the same first initial – two kids I can handle but 3 or more… come on Mr. and Mrs. Dawson, get a Baby Name book – Dougie Dawson’s siblings were Diane and Donald … in my bizarro head they’re a waddling family of Disney ducks!)

I’d throw the inky newspapers into a big, off-white burlap-like sack with a long shoulder strap and head off over to Woodman Drive to plunk each of those 35 broadsheet papers in front of my customers’ doors.

I even delivered one to old Mrs. Ogilvie who, in her Scottish brogue, fingered me to the police as the 11 year-old car thief she saw driving off from in front of her building.

Can you see the look on the burly police officers’ faces when I was called down to the principal’s office at Glen Brae middle school for interrogation? Shaking in my little Grade 6 runners, I tried to squeak out answers to their probing of “where were you on the morning of blah blah blah?“. I froze up and couldn’t remember. They sent me – trembling – across the hall to the library to try and recall a few details.

All the cops had to do was look at me. I was short for my age – if my foot was pressing hard, pedal to the metal of a hot-wired car, my beady eyes would have been staring into the deep, dark bottom curve of the steering wheel.

Yes, it would have been a very short journey and then I’d have ended up in JUVIE, strip-searched and well on my way to a Clyde Barrow life of crime, perhaps even a White Collar Banker!

My life would be so different if Mrs. Ogilvie was right …

Screw you Mrs. Ogilvie … CASE CLOSED (but only after they went after my brother Gord, the next older paperboy in my family)!

Anyway, it was a pre-digital era where the only way you or I would be seen or heard by a broader audience is if we:

stole a car
designed and built a car, or
got run over by a car.

But I stopped being a paperboy a little while ago now and I’ve decided that I won’t only be a consumer or delivery person of the news … I am going to create the news.

News comes in international, national, local, and personal varietals. Some of us are meant to be heard on the bigger, macro stage – the Obamas, the Putins, the Jennifer Lawrences – but really, the news I’m talking about here is on the micro level.

The headlines I’m interested in, you won’t be reading about in the Globe and Mail or see Anderson Cooper mentioning on CNN.

I’m creating a local, more personal version of the news. My edition of the news is called Man on the Fringe, and I’ve been your faithful reporter here for over 2 years and – last time I checked – 121 blog posts.

I choose to broadcast my news via this WordPress blog site, which isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. But really, making your own news isn’t about telling the whole world about yourself, it’s about telling yourself what YOU are all about.

I have a story, you have a story, everyone has a story.

Every morning we wake up and we begin to write our news story. The question becomes… will it be a momentous news day, or just another Pleasant Valley Sunday?

We can lie on our backs and look dreamily to the stars. In the ether between the chill earth and the distant cosmos there are a billion truths, and you have to choose the star that contains the truth that is yours.

Like slowly wafting snowflakes, no two truths, no two stars, no two lives are identical. You can never be identical to someone else but you can manufacture a snowflake life of beauty and meaning that reflects your beauty and your strength.

I can’t tell you what will make your news story special and unique. That is for each of us to discover.

It might be one overarching story that defines your full life existence, but more likely it will contain a gooey, messy, mixed combination of small vignettes that coalesce into a complete and complex story that becomes you.

My own story is a mosaic of writing and music and travel, fitness and woodcraft, reading and cooking and growth in its different forms. Like I said … Messy!

Make your own news, call it passion if you will, perhaps you prefer to label it “life’s shitty meaning”. The title doesn’t matter, the action is the key. Any action is better than no action. And don’t be afraid of mistakes… You’ll never look more foolish than me. Guaranteed.

Write a song: climb a hill that has intimidated you for years: practice hitting 500 putts: make a pie pastry for the first time: shear a sheep: build a spaghetti bridge: start a small business you’ve dreamed of since you were 16: make a life-sized sculpture of Taylor Swift from toilet paper.

In today’s headlines: